[Rcpp-devel] Rcpp & static variables

[Giuseppe Milicia]

Dirk,

Unfortunately the pieces of code that use static variables are lost in the depth of my libraries.

I used to mix R and Java using rJava, when you do that you can keep object references in R rather easily, that is not immediately possible with Rcpp. Somehow I didn't think about static variables (after all we just have a shared library loaded by the R process), so now I'm using static variables to make my system stateful, it seems to work rather nicely :)

In a Rcpp document I read (can't find it anymore, perhaps an old vignette?) there was a paragraph about Rcpp being stateless, perhaps the vignette could mention that you can use static variables to keep state around? It's obvious on hindsight, but somehow I didn't connect the dots when I started to using Rcpp...

Cheers,

//Giuseppe

________________________________________
From: Dirk Eddelbuettel [edd at debian.org]
Sent: 30 April 2010 18:14
To: Giuseppe Milicia
Cc: rcpp-devel at lists.r-forge.r-project.org
Subject: Re: [Rcpp-devel] Rcpp & static variables

Hi Guiseppe,

Thanks for reposting here!

On 30 April 2010 at 16:07, Giuseppe Milicia wrote:
| Guys,
|
| I posted this on R-help and Dirk kindly pointed out that this list is a much better place for this sort of questions...
|
| I was wondering whether anyone experimented with Rcpp and static
| variables. I remember reading that Rcpp is essentially stateless. That
| makes sense. However I just run a piece of code that contains a static STL
| structure, surprisingly  it seems that those static variables are
| preserved...

I have not used it explicitly.

But I do use code in production that instantiates singletons etc to keep
e.g. connection handles to a backend.  I initialize this on package load --
using a nice clean hook provided by R and then hold on to it until the
package unloads, which in practice is when the R session ends.  That works
cleanly via constructor and deconstructor calls.

| The question is, can we use static variable to reliably preserve state
| between Rcpp calls? If this is the case, this should be a better way to
| store state than by passing state variables between R and C++.

I don't see why not. Can you mock up an example of what you are trying to do?

--
  Regards, Dirk

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